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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

I understand your dilemma, but I don't see a way around hiring a professional.

Think of one of the simpler tasks. Say you need to fertilize the trees. When is the right time? What is the right amount? How many people do you need to fertilize 8000 trees in time? How do you finance that, including purchasing the fertilizer? Are you even allowed to purchase that much fertilizer (it's been often abused to make car bombs)?

No idea whether fertilizing is even a thing with coffee, but other tasks won't be much simpler.

If you can't hire one, is taking on a temporary partner (for a cut off the profit) an option?

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As you said it's a huge dilemma. I will keep it as green as possible, even if it cuts production by a big percentage. I'd rather have it fail that be not environmentally friendly. My life does not depend on it, I can afford to fail and that is why I want to try. I can hire people, labors are cheap where I live so that won't be a problem. A partner is fine if competent enough I guess. For now the goal is to break even, If I can achieve that it will be win already.

World coffee research may be a good place for you to learn about coffee farming in the 21st century. Another commenter mentioned you won't be able to farm the old ways, and WCR could support you going forward.

At the very least they could point you in the right direction to get started, and maybe even know someone you could hire.

https://worldcoffeeresearch.org/

I will contact them, thanks for the link.

>I will keep it as green as possible, even if it cuts production by a big percentage. I'd rather have it fail that be not environmentally friendly. My life does not depend on it, I can afford to fail and that is why I want to try.

I'm skeptical that you're in a position where you can afford to fail, short of edge cases like "I just let the land lie fallow and pump no money whatsoever into it" or "I am a multi-millionaire already without the plantation".

My life does not depend on it, so if it fails, I will lose money for sure but that's fine, won't be the first nor the last time. Labor is cheap and I want to try.

> Say you need to fertilize the trees. When is the right time? What is the right amount? How many people do you need to fertilize 8000 trees in time?

You experiment. It takes a lot of time, yes, but it’s not that difficult.

I find your answer and many other here overly pessimistic and unkind. Not every thing is about hustling a business to perfection and on the first try.

> You experiment. It takes a lot of time, yes, but it’s not that difficult.

A failed experiment might cost you 8000 trees. It takes a massive amount of time, and money, to re-launch an experiment of this scale. And every re-launch, you restart the 3-4 year clock until trees are mature enough to harvest.

When you quoted me, you left out the part about how to finance all of this.

> Not every thing is about hustling a business to perfection and on the first try.

With an 8000 tree farm, that point is you very very likely have only one try.

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